“Arthur, this is an old friend of mine, Mr Garrett.”
Then arose a queer-looking old fellow, short, rotund of person, and whose exceeding rubicundity of visage betokened, I fear, anything but aversion for ardent spirits. Running one stubby hand through his bristly grey hair, he extended the other to Claverton.
“’Ow do—’ow do? Not been long in the country, have you? My word, but it’s a fine country, this is—fine country for young fellers like you.”
Claverton thought the country contained also some advantages for the speaker; and he was right. Here was old Joe Garrett, who never knew his father, if he had one, and who, having early in the century deserted from a two-hundred-ton merchant brig lying in Algoa Bay, had started in colonial life as a journeyman carpenter. By hook or by crook he had made his way, and now, by virtue of the four fine farms which he owned, he deemed himself very much of a landed proprietor, and every whit the equal of Walter Brathwaite, “whose ancestors wore chain-armour in the fourteenth century,” as some one or other’s definition of a gentleman runs.
“I was jest such a young feller as you once,” went on this embodiment of colonial progress. “I landed in this country in nothin’ but the clothes to my back, and look at me now. Now, I’ll tell you what I did,” and the oracle, slapping one finger into the palm of the of her hand, looked up into his victim’s face with would-be impressive gravity, “I worked; that’s what I did—I worked. Now, you may depend upon it, that for a young feller there’s nothin’ like a noo country—and work!”
“I suppose so,” acquiesced Claverton, horribly sick of this biography.
“Now a noo country,” went on the oracle, “a noo country, sez I, ain’t an old one. ’Ere you’re free; there,” flinging out a stubby hand in the imaginary direction of Great Britain, “nothing but forms and sticklin’. Now, ’ere I can sit down to dinner without putting on a swallow-tail-coat and a white choker, for instance. No; give me a noo country and freedom, sez I.”
“Quite right, Mr Garrett. A swallow-tailed coat plays the mischief with the digestion, and science has discovered that a white choker tarnishes the silver. Something in the starch, you know—arsenic, they say.”
“No! You don’t say so now?” returned the other, open-mouthed, and not detecting the fine irony of his banterer’s tone.
“Yes, of course. And now excuse me. I must go and find my partner.”